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September 2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XIX — September 2023: invasion of jurisdiction
We returned to Barcelona. The house behaved as if it could reset itself on its own. The suitcases hit the hallway floor, the keys rang again against the ceramic dish. A cosmetic normality trying to say nothing happened here. But the body does not buy that kind of trick.
The grandmothers were gone. The silence they left behind felt heavy: an exact mixture of relief and the immediate guilt of feeling that relief. The house looked like a house for two again, but with one detail that ruined the math: Deborah stayed. Hair on the floor, footsteps behind doors. A physical reminder that intimacy never fully remains a matter of just two people.
Camilo came back different. He crossed the threshold like someone who had just completed a survival mission and was finally allowing himself to collapse. I watched him move through the house with a mix of tenderness and fatigue: there was real love there, but my body was already in the red.
And then the subject of his father resurfaced. During the month, Ana had insisted on building bridges that Camilo clearly did not feel. The soft dynamite of the surname. The pressure to place filial duty above lived reality. I had promised myself I would give him space, that I would not interfere. I bit my tongue until I could taste blood.
It did not work. I intervened.
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I remembered the conversation with Ana before she left. I intercepted it and said what was true without ornament.
I told her there had been negligence in that upbringing, that damage exists in the body even when there is love, and that if Camilo ever decided to return to Colombia to face all of that, this time he would not do it alone. There was a long, thick silence, and then an embrace.
While I was unpacking my suitcase in the bedroom, Brenda cleared her throat from the back of my mind, dragging out the words with clinical coldness:
“Invasion of jurisdiction. You keep taking on repairs that are not yours in order to convince yourself that you are indispensable.”
I stood still, a half-folded shirt in my hands.
That night we turned off the lights. Deborah got onto the bed first. She settled exactly in the center, between the two of us, with the heavy calm of someone who no longer needs to ask permission. Camilo touched the pillow and fell asleep within minutes. His breathing deepened.
I could not close my eyes.